“Gingerbread”, “Normal Again”, and The Turn of the Screw have left me a bit puzzled in my ever changing definition of the Gothic. I wonder whether or not resolution is a true gothic trope. At the beginning of this course I would have said absolutely. Dracula and episodes like "Nightmares" led me to believe that this was standard. That Gothic tales are meant to terrify, but ultimately conclude with a solid, however dissatisfying ending. For example, the vampire Carmilla ultimately gets destroyed and Laura gets to live out her life. Same thing goes inNorthanger Abbey, as we watched Catherine Moreland's future unfold. So in a tale like Henry James's, it is easy to see why I might get confused. The story itself is twisted in a Gothic manner, right down to the actual Gothic manor. The ending, however, is all wrong. Does the governess intentionally strangle Miles, or does he truly see the ghost of Mr. Quint? You have to stop and decide for yourself how to interpret the ending. And that, is driving me just about as insane as the governess(shameless debate group self promotion going on here). While "Gingerbread" does have a definitive ending, it is a painful episode to watch because its resolution is unlike any in previous episodes. For a good 35 minutes, I was truly concerned as to how Buffy and Willow would make it out of this scrape. There wasn't that comfort that comes with seeing the Scooby Gang slowly but surely defeat the evil du jour. In "Normal Again", I was, well, again struck by that same panic, that same uneasiness throughout the episode. Maybe I'm just too gullible, but even though I knew Buffy's friends and family weren't actually just her mind playing tricks, I was still worried about her. Or were they just tricks? Are you just tricks? Mid-blog existential crisis, go. But really, though both episodes have a more solid conclusion than The Turn of the Screw, they both gave me the same sensation. The feeling that I was just missing out on a bit of information that would make things ever so much clearer.
Also, just so we are clear. The governess, yeah she cray cray.
Madison, I completely understand your confusion here and I think that you raise a lot of good points. I just recently wrote an essay for my Romanticisms class about the contradictory nature of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's gothic poem, "Christabel." I argued that, because resolution, the ultimate solving of the mystery is an integral gothic trope, it becomes difficult to reconcile the unfinished produce of Christabel and the gothic genre.
ReplyDeleteJust had a mid-blog existential crisis in my Gingerbread post, then read yours and noticed your existential crisis. This Doppelganger thing has gone too far, Kircher.
ReplyDeleteI think that the ambiguous outcome of the Turn of the Screw makes it even more a part of the gothic tradition. Gothic, to me, seems to be unexpected evil infringing on our own normality. In Gingerbread, Buffy's normality is evil: vampires, demons, etc. She (us included) is comfortable in her knowledge that any big baddies stem from this evil. So when she sees the dead children, it is shocking that "something with a soul" could have committed the crime. As is it shocking that her own mother (who, in her normal world, doesn't participate in the world of slaying) is corrupting her job with an injection of reality. That is what is so unsettling. Well, at least to me.
And, fun Wiki tidbit, the dead boy grew up to be Andrew (the redhead's son) on Desperate Housewives. Fun fact.